Business Process Management built a pricing exception tracker

“We have a backup somewhere.”— Finance Business Partner

Reason:

Mainly because the Asana CLone needs 6 clicks and two approvals to change a phone number. With 248 users and 60 feature requests.

Built by:

Nadia, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

money stored as FLOAT

Authentication:

MFA exists, but everyone clicked "remember this device forever"

Deployment:

running on a VM with 3 GB of free disk space

Responsible:

whoever happens to be on call

Documentation:

tribal knowledge, technically

Security situation:

the certificate expired 823 days ago

Future disaster:

It will become impossible to shut down because 16 other tools depend on it.

Age: 7.5 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 4 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 398 users, alive 130x longer than intended, 2 accidental connections.